A good match actually meant there was money on at least one side, if not both. If the parties even liked, let alone loved, one another, well, that was simply icing on the cake. The Regency-era marriage was mainly a matter of business.
Jane Austen saw that keenly, and felt for the plight of women in her time, with their limited options. They could inherit money, marry money, or eke out a barely respectable living as a teacher or governess.
“If there is a good fortune on one side, there can be no occasion for any on the other,” said Catherine Morland, Jane Austen’s heroine in Northanger Abbey.
Games People Play
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?” said Mr. Bennet, from Pride and Prejudice. One can imagine Jane Austen watching closely, and laughing heartily with her sister Cassandra over their neighbours and acquaintances.
- Famously, in Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney, the book’s hero, compares marriage to a dance:
- “You will allow that in both man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution…”
- Catherine Morland, his partner in conversation, the dance, and later, in romance, is generally romantic but has moments of sheer common sense. Here, she is given a kicker of a reply: “People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance, only stand opposite to each other in a long room for half an hour.”
- In each of her novels, as well as her unfinished works, Jane Austen describes the maneuverings of mating and marriage. It was not for the faint of heart. Nor necessarily for the honest of heart, either, for Jane Austen herself had to admit she did not love a man who had asked her to marry him and retracted a one-night engagement to a family acquaintance who she liked but did not love.
In Jane Austen’s day, people had to choose their marriage partners carefully, yet there were often few options to choose from, or else the young people had no say in the matter.
- Consider the plight of Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth Bennet’s father in Pride and Prejudice. He saw a pretty girl some 20 years earlier, and thought her lively, captivating, and altogether lost his heart to her. The would-be Mrs. Bennet was probably much like her youngest daughter Lydia – lively and spirited, yet with little common sense. As Jane Austen describes the two people, readers can well imagine how Mr. Bennet perhaps quickly learned his “mistake” made in a flight of fancy.
- “Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous.”
Dangerous Liaisons
From the matchmaking heroine in Emma to the flighty and conniving male and female characters in Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen describes the joys and dangers along the path of courtship and marriage.
- She makes light of her own feelings, and readers are not sure how deeply she regrets saying good-bye to men over and over again: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea,” she wrote in a letter to her sister Cassandra in January 1796.
- Jane Austen has her favourite heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, teasingly say these words to Mr. Darcy: “Is not general incivility the very essence of love?” And in fact, those two would later make a match that appeared to be full of passion on both sides – but not after some general incivility, also from both.
- Again, the dangers of courtship in Jane Austen’s day, and indeed to this very moment, are described by Elizabeth Bennet: “That would be the greatest misfortune of all! – to find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate!”
Jane Austen viewed courtship and marriage quite seriously. So seriously, in fact, that she often made light of it and pointed out in humorous, witty, and sometimes even slightly satirical ways the means people would go to for what was considered a good match.
But in the end, only one thing was considered a good match in Jane Austen’s eyes, and that was a marriage of love, with affection on both sides.
The words of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey could well be Jane Austen’s own: “And to marry for money I think the wickedest thing in existence.”
Sources:
The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen, compiled by Dominique Enright, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2002, 2007.
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, Doubleday and Company, 1945.
Pamela Mooman - Pamela Mooman I am an award-winning writer and editor. I have more than 19 years of experience working in a variety of subjects and ...
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